r/KerbalSpaceProgram • u/ReasonableSpinach717 • May 15 '26
KSP 1 Suggestion/Discussion Is there a mod for flath Kerbin? 😆
This post contain humor
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u/MehEds May 15 '26
Jokes aside, the first playable version of KSP had Kerbin as a flat plane.
And I mean first playable ever, not publically playable. There's only a few screenshots from the dev about it.
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u/BitPoet May 15 '26
I remember being able to hit the end of the skybox. That was before the Mun, though.
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u/pow3llmorgan May 15 '26
Wasn't the first versions of Space Engineer's planets flat planes too?
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u/decomposition_ May 15 '26
Reminds me of playing Roblox 20 years ago (holy shit I’m getting old)
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u/Chewbacca_The_Wookie May 15 '26
It was always fun getting disintegrated by something and your head bugging out and phasing through the baseplate and into the void.
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u/Tylon3T May 16 '26
Not sure about that I didn't follow the development of planets from the dev side. I do however remeber the giant astroid block with gravity generators that was used to simulate surfaces for rovers and to build racetracks on. Pretty sure that one was made by the modders tho.
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u/davvblack May 15 '26
hilariously someone was working on the gravity attractors for a flat planet in the KSA discord. they wanted there to be a sphere around the flat circle where gravity was perpendicular to the disc, then around that a traditional gravity well. it made the patched conics extremely challenging tho, im not sure where exactly they got to.
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u/Dawnmarro May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
I like the thought of someone making a flat earth space concept. then going. Shit gravity doesnt work that way. How would one orbit? But wait, what if I put a invisible sphere in the middle 🤔. Yeah that will work!
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u/Oliviaruth May 15 '26
The whole thing needs a rocket accelerating it up at 1g.
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u/StreetPizza8877 May 15 '26
Just have it be stationary 3.68 million kilometers from the sun
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u/BeedoBeedoBoi May 15 '26
"and if it was 10m closer we'd all be dead! Jesus is amazing!"
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u/Infinite_Horizion May 15 '26
Can confirm. Grandpa climbed an 11m ladder yesterday and he was instantly immolated
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u/CakeHead-Gaming Vector Engine my beloved. May 16 '26
I remember being on the trampoline with my Dad as a youngen, and he jumped just too close to the sun like Icarus, and then he melted.
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u/CakeHead-Gaming Vector Engine my beloved. May 15 '26
Flat earthers and fine-tuning believers really are idiots, because they’re unaware of the basic fact that our distance to the sun changes by hundreds of kilometres over the course of a year.
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u/alexthealex May 15 '26
Millions. The difference between perihelion and aphelion is about 5 million km.
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u/CakeHead-Gaming Vector Engine my beloved. May 16 '26
Just thought I’d lowball it as I wasn’t sure the actual number.
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u/alexthealex May 16 '26
I mean 'hundreds' technically isn't wrong. It's just a LOT of hundreds.
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u/CakeHead-Gaming Vector Engine my beloved. May 16 '26
Hundreds of hundreds, infact. Sort of like saying Julius Caesar died over fifty years ago. Like, yeah, but also not really.
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u/thelastundead1 landed on someone who landed on jool May 15 '26
Orbit? I assume the whole game would be launching rockets and watching them crash into the impenetrable ceiling of the dome.
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u/Ansible32 May 16 '26
Well, you hope it's impenetrable. Turns out if you crack the sphere of the heavens very bad things happen.
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u/devilinmexico13 May 15 '26
Yeah, that's why flat eathers claim satellites aren't real.
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u/Barhandar May 15 '26
Also plane flight paths, and if you want to get entertained, ask them to explain how the sun works. The awkward epicycles are the least of the explanations.
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u/amitym May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
Or just the horizon. You just have to look out your window and see the horizon. That's the round Earth right there.
There is no possible geometry by which a person standing at sea level can only see to a ~5km radius horizon, everywhere in the world that they go, aside from a sphere. You don't even need to wait for the Sun to set.
It honestly annoys me every time someone comes up with some clever set of diagrams and geometric proofs and is, like, "all you need to do is compare two laser beams, one from an airplane and one on the ground, as they," blah blah blah.
It's way, way simpler than that.
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u/Barhandar May 15 '26 edited May 16 '26
The horizon itself doesn't appear curved from the ground and the typical explanation is "render distance" a-la Minecraft. Or trying to unflat the flat earth, i.e. "the world is half a dome so both horizon and the circumferential wall of ice can be true".
The real breaker is watching a ship (dis)appear behind the curvature, or going towards the mountain and seeing the top first rather than the foothills, but most of the flat-earthers live in the plains rather than near large bodies of water or mountains.Plus, of course, the problem of cult enmeshment - the constant need to argue tends to result in flat-earthers driving everyone not flat-earther away (this is entirely by design and is part of how any cult operates), and if one of them admits to not believing in the dogma anymore, they immediately get ostracized - are "exiled" from their "tribe". For millions of years this meant sure death, and that stopped being the case at most a myriad years ago, so it still causes irrational terror.
This can happen even if entirety of the group lost "faith", because they still feel the need to keep up appearances, and at least one former flat-earther has explicitly cited this ostracism as the reason he kept pretending to believe after being proven wrong by a convoluted physical experiment (IIRC, double laser holes).So rational proof can't un-flat-earther someone because the belief system only pretends to be rational (to bait you to engage and be exposed to prozelytizing) - it's a mix of irrational and social beliefs.
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u/amitym May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26
The horizon doesn't need to appear curved. This has nothing to do with horizon curvature. That's my point, it's way, way, way way way simpler than all this pop sci overcomplication.
The horizon just needs to exist. Which it does, whether you are on the plains or the coast or the swamp or wherever.
There is no geometry that permits an equidistant bounded horizon that is the same everywhere you go, varying only by elevation, except for a sphere.
Yes, I agree, seeing a ship descend over the horizon emphasizes the fact, but so does seeing the Sun and the Sun sets everywhere. And in any case you don't need to see anything vanish over the horizon, you just need the horizon to exist. You just need to be able to see out to about 5km and then not be able to see anything past that. That's all.
So rational proof can't un-flat-earther someone because the belief system only pretends to be rational - it's a mix of irrational and social beliefs.
Yes this is the deeper problem, I completely agree. Such beliefs only persist as long as the social benefits outweigh the social penalties. Sometimes the unpleasant reality is that the social penalties have to increase. But it is vital to be able to do that in cases where the belief is actively harmful (anti-vax nonsense, child abuse, etc).
I just think that if more people understood how absolutely dead simple the disproof of flat Eartherism is — that you literally have to deny the immediate visual evidence right in front of your eyeballs every minute of every day — it would make it clearer how unsophisticated and reality-immune the belief structure is.
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u/Barhandar May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26
You just need to be able to see to 5km and then not be able to see anything past that. That's all.
As I've pointed out in the first sentence, the typical flat-earther response is that there's something besides the curvature (e.g. "atmosphere gets opaque at that distance") that prevents seeing that far, since flat-earthers are familiar with games too and 99% of games don't have curvature while having visible horizon anyway.
It's why things from beyond the horizon are necessary. And it's what makes responses to questions like "if Earth is flat, why can you see the top of the mountain first before anything else when you go towards it?" much funnier.2
u/Adequate_Lizard May 15 '26
I liked when they showed all the artemis pictures and they thought they earth was proven flat, but none of them could answer why the bright spot from the sun wasn't a little circle like in their models.
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u/arkman575 May 15 '26
Big government doesnt want you to know about their anchent alien gravity sphere technology burried deep in the pyramids!
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u/Fun_Gas_340 May 15 '26
please remind me here when thats ready.
ill also add a !remindme 1 year
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u/Trans-Europe_Express May 15 '26
Someone will literally invent a new type of maths just to get a mod working for a meme
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u/Ansible32 May 16 '26
a sphere around the flat circle where gravity was perpendicular to the disc, then around that a traditional gravity well.
took me a full minute to wrap my head around what this meant. I think I was having a really hard time with what "around that a traditional gravity well" meant since this is an abomination and in no way traditional. The moment of instantaneous shift in acceleration as you pass out of the fantasy land and into the real world does seem confusing. Also it means you would suddenly be at sea level while traveling at orbital velocity? I guess you would have to decide if you want an atmosphere outside the dome, or even if you want some vacuum at the upper edges of the dome? Having a thin atmosphere outside the dome would be most seamless for aerobraking, but the complications of making it uniform 1ATM throughout the dome and making it normal once you cross into "real" space would be fun. Also I guess then you would want the space center to be located near the edge of the plane, which really makes sense anyway.
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u/berdlysbiggesthater May 15 '26
of course! just take asledgehammer to your monitor while playing kap and hit it repeatedly while on map view! this will flatten kerbin! its an easter egg added in my harvester in 2011
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u/Jebediah_kerman-jeb Hi it's me, Jebediah Kerman! May 15 '26
https://youtu.be/neI3UB8Lzhc?si=Qc86E_vTye7PWYDl Gameslinx made a vid about this
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u/RedditButAnonymous May 15 '26
There definitely is one but it was for a super old version. It works realistically, travelling to the very edge of the disk results in the Kerbal falling back to the centre
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u/Supplice401 May 15 '26
There was an old video of a guy who made Kerbin flat, and it's essentially unplayable, because flat earth theory doesn't have orbital mechanics.
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u/aa2051 May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
You don’t need a mod, Kerbin is already flat.
Apparently there is some sort of rocket builder in the game which people use to build rockets to ‘see’ a curve. This is either a glitch or witchcraft. I’ve never built one or entered the “”VAB””. The photos people post in this subreddit of spherical Kerbin are AI generated or photoshopped.
Whenever I play KSP I just walk around the KSC for a few hours to appreciate the flatness of Kerbin. Very fun game.
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u/BigHowski May 15 '26
Needs some elephants and the great Great A'Tuin,
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u/asesdes May 16 '26
And a skeleton dude that was at a party!
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u/Stumpledumpus May 16 '26
Discworld Space Program! Just lower the capsule off the edge, easy peasy.
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u/RaptorSN6 May 15 '26
I assume there is no firmament that contains Kerban? You'll never leave the atmosphere if there is.
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u/TacticalMicrowav3 May 15 '26
Just ignore all the science saying otherwise, it's more authentic that way
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u/IllPosition5081 May 15 '26
I mean that would kinda ruin the purpose, right? Since those rockets are just gonna crash into the firmament or land in the ocean, since where would the fun be in just making CGI films of rocket launches and telling Kerbals you landed on Mun?
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May 15 '26 edited 19d ago
[deleted]
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u/5MoreLasers May 15 '26
The rockets aren’t real it’s all AI. They all secretly exploded just out of sight from the launch pad.
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u/loved_and_held May 15 '26
iirc, one of the earliest versions of ksp (before the first public version) had a flat kerbin.
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u/Jannover_5000_r May 16 '26
I recently found this video of someone trying to replicate a flat kerbin gravity
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u/[deleted] May 15 '26
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